Tuesday, October 29, 2013

How did you like your "lower premiums by $2,500 per year" he promised you, too?

None of this should come as a shock to the Obama administration. The law states that policies in effect as of March 23, 2010 will be "grandfathered," meaning consumers can keep those policies even though they don't meet requirements of the new health care law. But the Department of Health and Human Services then wrote regulations that narrowed that provision, by saying that if any part of a policy was significantly changed since that date — the deductible, co-pay, or benefits, for example — the policy would not be grandfathered.

Buried in Obamacare regulations from July 2010 is an estimate that because of normal turnover in the individual insurance market, "40 to 67 percent" of customers will not be able to keep their policy. And because many policies will have been changed since the key date, "the percentage of individual market policies losing grandfather status in a given year exceeds the 40 to 67 percent range."

That means the administration knew that more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them.

Yet President Obama, who had promised in 2009, "if you like your health plan, you will be able to keep your health plan," was still saying in 2012, "If (you) already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance."

"This says that when they made the promise, they knew half the people in this market outright couldn't keep what they had and then they wrote the rules so that others couldn't make it either," said Robert Laszewski, of Health Policy and Strategy Associates, a consultant who works for health industry firms.

I

f you voted for this Lying Liar-in-Chief because you believed all these lies he told you, yes you can and should feel extremely betrayed.

Premiums for employer-provided family coverage rose $3,065 — 24% — from 2008 to 2012, the Kaiser survey found. Even if you start counting in 2009, premiums have climbed $2,370.

What's more, premiums climbed faster in Obama's four years than they did in the previous four under President Bush, the survey data show.

There's no question about what Obama was promising the country, since he repeated it constantly during his 2008 campaign.

In a debate with Sen. John McCain, for example, Obama said "the only thing we're going to try to do is lower costs so that those cost savings are passed onto you. And we estimate we can cut the average family's premium by about $2,500 per year."

At a campaign stop in Columbus, Ohio, in February 2008, Obama promised that "We are going to work with you to lower your premiums by $2,500. We will not wait 20 years from now to do it, or 10 years from now to do it. We will do it by the end of my first term as president."

"I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes."

That's quite the promise and one that's even more difficult to keep when you throw a new $1 trillion dollar health care entitlement into the mix. Americans for Tax Reform posted today a list of taxes that will put the American middle class into the [tax-increase] crosshairs.

First, there's the Obamacare individual mandate tax, which target six million families directly. There's also the Flexible Spending Account Tax, which puts "30 - 35 million Americans who use a pre-tax Flexible Spending Account (FSA) at work to pay for their family's basic medical needs face a new Obamacare cap of $2,500. This will squeeze $13 billion of tax money from Americans over the next ten years." And there are more items to this butcher's bill.

1. Obamacare High Medical Bills Tax....

2. Obamacare Medicine Cabinet Tax....

3. Obamacare Tax on Union Member and Early Retiree Health Insurance Plans....